Towards a “DGS-LEX”: A roadmap for the collaborative creation of a psycholinguistic database for German Sign Language (DGS)

Abstract

Lexical variables such as iconicity or age of acquisition are known to be important sources of variance in psycholinguistic experiments. To control for such variables, researchers working on German Sign Language (DGS) need to use stimuli rated for these constructs (e.g., iconicity) by an independent group of participants before implementing their actual experiment. Up to now, several research groups have made such rating data publicly available but a central resource is currently still lacking. Against this background, this short paper provides a roadmap for the collaborative creation of a so-called “DGS-LEX”, a lexical database for psycholinguistic research on DGS, similar to ASL-LEX. By integrating relevant data from different published and forthcoming studies, this joint effort aims to establish a new database for lexical variables in DGS primarily based upon subjective ratings. (Note: This paper is trilingual. The contents of the English, German, and DGS versions are identical.)

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